EVENTS

There is no hope for humanity

My new favorite thing is @herpderpedia on twitter, who is retweeting all of the completely moronic things people are saying because of the Wikipedia blackout. It’s simultaneously hilarious and soul crushing. There seem to be some common themes, like:

Why is Wikipedia down?! (If you could read, you would know…)

How am I supposed to do my homework without plagiarizing Wikipedia?!

Wikipedia is never coming back!

Why did Obama shut down Wikipedia?!

Wikipedia is gay!

Why did soap/a sofa shut down Wikipedia?!

Except with way more caps lock, swearing, and race/gender based insults.

Shortly after midnight, I was browsing the Spanish wikipedia and using Chromes translation feature.

Some odd phrasings, and missed words, but it was usable.

The Irish version worked too, but Chrome didn’t pop up an offer to translate. Irish(and other Celtic languages) have some odd features that tend to frustrate machine translation, I suppose that’s why Chrome didn’t ask(though Google translate does offer the option).

As far as I know, only the main English language site was blacked out.

Well-sourced articles are actually really useful as aggregators of relevant literature. Given that most of the alternatives tend to be subject to Some Motherfucker With Its Hand Out, that’s an extremely useful function.

The Isaac Asimov article was a huge help in my lit class. Would have preferred it to be less help, though, I had to force myself to conclude on page 12 so that I could complete it in time(there was an expected length of 4-5 pages, though no formal minimum or maximum as long as the content was solid)

Didn’t cite it, but it did give me ideas on where to take the paper, and good sources to use. Wikipedia shouldn’t be your main source(unless the project is about wikipedia itself maybe), but it is a very powerful tool for getting started.

I agree, I frequently find Wikipedia quite useful, and use it regularly.
My point, with regard to DannyMaxwell, is that if he could not figure out what was happening with Wikipedia, perhaps his future in any sort of reaseach is doubtful.

It’s not even “if they weren’t so stupid”. If they weren’t too lazy to read the page linked from the page Wikipedia threw up for the blackout, it includes “How to continue using Wikipedia during the blackout”.

Much like Godwin’s Law I’m starting to wish Poe’s Law had never been articulated, insofar as it allows sloppy thinkers to A) lazily dismiss any and all idiocy, even when its proponents are blatantly serious-as-a-lynch-mob or even actually-in-the-process-of-becoming-a-lynch-mob, as “probably a joke,” and B) childishly derail any discussion or dissection of idiocy with the inane suggestion, apropos of nothing, that the idiocy in question might be a joke.

And as has been eloquently argued elsewhere, it’s not like it’d matter if it were.

So maybe we can take the idiocy seriously for once? Because it’s kinda growing all over everything.

To argue (somewhat lamely) that there is still hope for humanity: A lot of those tweets are people complaining about not being able to do homework. From this I theorize that much of the stupidest sentiments are from high-school and college students. Everyone is required to publicly proclaim at least three face-palmingly asinine opinions before the age of 25.

The irony is that these people are the ones who need Wikipedia the most, ie the ones who rely on it for the most basic information. I’d like to think the people who read this blog are smart enough to regard Wiki as a merely a starting point for their informed information. Anyway, if you hit escape before the page finishes loading you got to see the lot without the blackout message. (Even knowing this I decided to use the powers for good not evil and refrained from using Wikipedia during the 24 hour period).

While I agree the tweets were pathetic, at least they were asking the question and were angry about it. Even if they didn’t know what or who to be angry with, they were inconvenienced enough to, for once, pay attention to the world outside themselves. I find that just a little (but only a little) encouraging.

I’ve been dealing with the whining of an acquaintance who just knows that this blackout was WAY MORE inconvenient that anything that might happen because of SOPA or PIPA! And he couldn’t get to websites and his day was RUINED! Any attempt to explain that he’s either naive or extremely stupid is met with “FREE MARKET LIBERTARIANISM!!!” Which I don’t get, because those bills sound about as far from free market libertarianism as you can get and still be speaking the same language.

Granted, the blackout did coincide with being snowed in, in Seattle, a fairly rare occurrence.